


It Won't Hurt like this Forever

by sweetfogarty



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Arguing, Break Up, Break Up Talk, F/M, Heavy Angst, Love, Medical Attention, Mentions of Death, Pain, Reader-Insert, Romance, Tragic Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 20:13:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17731880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetfogarty/pseuds/sweetfogarty
Summary: In which the reader has spent too many nights alone with their thoughts and decides that their relationship with Sweet Pea needs to come to an end.





	It Won't Hurt like this Forever

You laid awake, staring at your ceiling with your hands resting together on your stomach. Over the last few weeks, you had become well acquainted with how the ceiling looked, noticing every crack and piece of missing paint that sat above your head every day. You felt lots of things, however none of them were good. Anxious. Overwhelmed. Detached. And mostly torn. Deep in your head your thoughts were waging a war and night after night as you laid staring at your ceiling waiting for Sweet Pea to come home, a new battle took place. Tonight, you counted 16 cracks in your ceiling, one more than yesterday when you had been laid mulling over the same decision. Counting the cracks was just a way to put off even thinking about whether these sleepless nights were worth it anymore and whether you could go on being in a relationship that made you like anything but yourself.

Frustrated, you got up and trudged to the kitchen, making yourself a coffee. You slipped into a blanket on the sofa of your trailer as the silence followed you, your eyes immediately darting to the clock that read 4:45am. You flopped your head back in defeat, groaning loudly. This was late, even for Sweet Pea, and despite being exhausted you still couldn’t switch off and go to sleep because you were worried about him. You knew for your own sanity tonight had to be the last night that you laid awake like this with your head full of storms.

It wasn’t that you’d woken up one morning and had fallen out of love with him, if anything it was the opposite. You loved Sweet Pea more than you thought you were capable of loving anything. You adored the way his nose scrunched up when he was concentrating, the way he used to hold you close at night, his confidence and loyalty. But no matter how much you loved him, you were growing weary. You had been living this situation for weeks and as each night went on you felt more and more detached from the relationship you held so closely to your heart.

Things you found endearing and exciting when you first entered each other’s lives made you ambivalent and dispirited. When you first met him, patching him up after a fight was exhilarating. The way he desperately knocked at your door, giving you a small, relieved smile as you opened up and ushered him into the bathroom with first aid supplies already prepared and awaiting his arrival, made you feel like the only girl in that mattered to him in that moment. You would caress his face gently, holding his hair out of the way as you dabbed away the blood and dirt. That was where you had your first kiss. It wasn’t romantic or pre-planned, but it was raw and truthful and honest. Now however, you left the first aid kit in the bathroom and left him to do it himself, turning away from him when he got into bed after. Before, you would have asked him questions about his clashes and fights, now you didn’t want to know the details. You had spent too many nights wide awake tossing and turning as he prowled the streets with the Serpents and it was taking a toll on you.

Rustling outside the door pulled you back into reality from your blank stare. The sun was coming up and you were still sat neatly on the sofa of your trailer with your coffee between your hands. You didn’t know how long you had been staring blankly mulling things over. The rustling outside of the door turned into fumbling with the front door lock and your stomach dropped, your pulse increasing causing you to sweat. The door opened, and Sweet Pea ambled in, stopping momentarily to look at you with a confused expression dancing across his bloodied face, before locking the door and trudging towards the bathroom. You hesitated and stood, following quietly behind him, stopping in the doorway of the tiled room where Sweet Pea was fumbling with an antiseptic wipe for his cuts.

“Pea,” You mumbled, your voice barely above a whisper as your heart and lungs desperately tried to stop you from starting this conversation that you didn’t want to be having. You fought the reluctance, calling his name a little louder when he didn’t hear you. “Sweet Pea.”

His head whipped around, a blank expression on his face as his eyes searched yours for some explanation as to why you were here with him. It had been weeks since you’d tended to his wounds for him. “What?”

You hesitated before answering, an uneasy feeling filling your body from your toes all the way to the tips of your fingers. “You missed some,” You replied softly, just wanting a few moments of normality before you unravelled and sacrificed everything that kept you feeling secure. You set your coffee cup down and extended a hand to take the wipe from him. You carefully cradled his head, gently wiping the blood away that had dried in his eyebrow as he rinsed his bloodied knuckles in the sink. As you looked down on his face, you could see the skin around his eye beginning to speckle with bruising and you couldn’t help but sigh quietly. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, Spyder spotted some Ghoulies on their initiation snooping around our bikes and we ended up getting into a fight with them. I’m okay though, I think one of them managed to throw a decent punch, but his luck didn’t last long,” Sweet Pea recalled, his eye twitching as you touched a particularly sensitive part of his face. His head tilted up slightly to look at you as you finished sterilising his cut and dropped the wipe into the bin. “Are you okay?”

You thought for a moment about how to answer his question; it was so simple to him but had much more weight with you. You settled with a small, “I’m tired,” as you moved back over to the counter in front of Sweet Pea where your coffee sat, getting cold.

“Well yeah, it’s 5:30am, I’m tired too,” He laughed, standing ready to go to the bedroom like any normal night.

It was now or never. You couldn’t take another night of waiting up not knowing what state he would be in when he came home, or if he would even come home at all.

“No Pea, I’m tired,” You repeated quietly, knitting your hands together nervously as Sweet Pea’s lingering grin dropped, and his eyes once again searched yours. Your heart was in your throat and you couldn’t bear to look at him any longer, averting your eyes to your hands.

“What do you mean? What do you mean you’re tired?” Sweet Pea asked quickly and worriedly, his voice quivering as he stood frozen in place. He fiddled with his rings and began picking at the fresh scabs on his knuckles as he waited anxiously for some kind of clarification from you.

You wondered whether you should give him the full truth or whether to save the details. You settled on the full truth. You had spent so long bottling this up, and he deserved to know the real reasons behind the end of your relationship, not just some excuse you could make up to save you having a hard conversation.

“You go out and get blindingly drunk or get into fights and I worry about you. I haven’t slept well in so long because you spend all your time getting into trouble. I love that you spend time with your friends- I would never ask you to stop spending time with them; but I’ve spent so many nights awake filled with dread about what could happen to you and it’s wearing me down and making me feel like a shell of myself.” You laid your cards on the table vulnerably, hoping he would understand where you were coming from. Lying awake each night waiting for him was exhausting you physically and mentally and something had to give.

“Then don’t stay up and wait for me, go to sleep. Get some sleep and you’ll feel more like you. I never asked you to wait up for me, I thought you did it because you wanted to?” He replied innocently, a confused tone lacing his voice.

You knew he didn’t mean to, but his ignorance to the bigger picture frustrated you and you could feel yourself becoming vexed. Impulsively, you bit back at his confusion with anger.

“Pea you don’t get it, it’s not that easy- I can’t just sleep! Do you not think that I would just go to sleep if I could?” You raised your voice indignantly, immediately regretting it. You knew getting irked was the last thing you wanted to happen, but you were tired and you felt aggrieved. You took a deep breath and exhaled shakily, your frustration finally culminating in sadness. You could feel your face heating up as pressure built in your throat and you let out a choked whimper. “You don’t understand what it’s like to toss and turn all night and lay there wondering how you’re going to come home. Or if you’re even going to make it home at all. I worry about you Pea and I know you can look after yourself out there but all it takes is one wrong turn for you to end up really hurt. I don’t want to have to wake up one morning to see FP and Fangs on our doorstep not knowing how to tell me that you won’t be coming back. I’ve tried to be strong for you I really, really have, but I cannot bear the thought of you coming home in a body bag.”

Your voice broke as you thought about all the times you had mentally prepared yourself for the worst and you couldn’t hold back the sobs that tore through your body. You had spent months stifling your concern and anxiety about his wellbeing, and now it was all being released at once.

“I’ll stop going out and I’ll stop getting into fights. Please, I’ll do anything- whatever it takes.” Sweet Pea pleaded with clasped hands, taking a step towards you in desperation. His chest ached at the thought of losing you and he could only muster a mere whisper as he laid his heart bare for you. “You’re the only person I can ever see myself being happy with, please don’t leave me.”

“I don’t want you to change who you are for me; your fearless nature is what makes you you. It’s in your blood and your heart and it’s what made me want you in the first place, but now it just… It just causes me more stress than happiness and I don’t want us to be tainted by that.”

“Don’t you want me anymore?” Sweet Pea asked brokenly. It was somehow simultaneously the first and last question he wanted to ask and part of him didn’t even want to know the answer. His hands shook as he held his breath in anticipation of your response and he could feel a lump forming in his throat whilst tears began to gather in his eyes.

“Of course I still want you, Pea. I love so much about you, but I don’t love how this makes me feel. I’ve tried my hardest I really have, but just it isn’t enough anymore. I mended your cuts and bruises, but there’s nothing that can mend how I feel mentally apart from self-love and I can’t do that whilst I’m worrying so much about you each night. I spent so much time trying to keep our little flame alive because I was scared of the darkness that would come if I let it go out, but I never took the time to look up and see all the other sources of light in my life. And there are other sources of light in yours too.“

“But I love you.” Sweet Pea begged, his voice trembling with anguish. You looked up at him, closely this time. He was dishevelled and his face blotchy and red as tried desperately to fight back the tears that were glazing his eyes. Guilt washed over your entire body and you wanted nothing more than to take it all back and crawl into bed with him, but you needed this for yourself. You couldn’t love someone if you didn’t love yourself.

“And I love you.” You whispered as you closed your eyes tightly in pain, opening them again to see a torrent of tears cascading down his cheeks. It wasn’t the first time you had seen him cry, but it was the first time you’d seen him cry out of anything other than anger. Seeing that was enough to make you cry harder than before. “But I need to love myself now too, okay?”

Seeing Sweet Pea so broken made you feel like there was no oxygen in the room. Your chest felt like it was going to cave in under the pressure and it was like your lungs were being strangled. You looked at him pleadingly and feebly opened your arms. You just wanted one more embrace, a moment of closeness you hadn’t had with him in a long time. He wrapped you up in his arms almost instantaneously, your legs buckling as air finally filled your lungs again.

You both sunk to your knees. You could feel his chest heaving as he silently cried into your hair, your actions mimicking his. You couldn’t hold in your sniffles as you clung to him- he felt like home in so many ways. You stayed there with him for a while, tangled up in each other, neither one of you wanting to be the one who broke your last embrace.

He pulled back slightly and looked down at you with his bloodshot eyes and plump, sore lips, his calloused hands running over your cheeks to wipe away the stray tears that fell effortlessly. “My heart hurts so much,” He murmured, his voice gravelly and raw. “But I know you need this for yourself. I promise, I’ll wait for you for as long as it takes, until you love yourself as much as I love you. I never meant to make you feel like this.”

He placed a tender kiss on your forehead and pulled you back in tightly, his body trembling as the reality of what this meant for both of you settled in. “I do need this for myself Pea and I’m sorry for being selfish. I know you never meant for this to happen- I’m so sorry I couldn’t be stronger for you,” You began, feeling him squeeze you tighter as you referenced selfishness and self-blame. “And I know it hurts now and it might hurt for a while longer, but I promise you my love, it won’t hurt like this forever.“


End file.
